Euro File: Il Cinema è Bella

Ever since scooping two top prizes at Cannes last year, Italy has been breaking out the Asti to celebrate what looks like a cinematic rebirth. Some are even hailing the wins as the beginning of a neo-neorealist movement, a new wave of Italian film-making following in the footsteps of auteurs like Rossellini, De Sica and Fellini. "Italy's redemption," gushed a frontpage headling in daily newspaper La Repubblica the day after Gomorra (Gomorrah), a searing take on Naples' mafia, and Il Divo (The Star), a satire of former PM Giulio Andreotti, secured the Grand Prize and the Jury Prize respectively. "Suddenly, from a group of filmmakers who risked fading into simplistic, insignificant story lines and a made-for-TV mentality, springs a new generation of auteurs inspired by politically-engaged masters like Elio Petri and Francesco Rosi," the paper enthused. After Italian cinema's prominence of in the postwar era, it has, for many, been on the decline. Lately, Quentin Tarantino went so far as to brand Italian cinema "depressing".

"Recent films I've seen are all the same," he said last year. "They talk about boys growing up, or girls growing up, or couples having a crisis, or vacations of the mentally impaired." There have been noted directors in the meantime, of course, such as Cannes favorite Nanni Moretti, and international hits such as Cinema Paradiso, Il Postino and Life is Beautiful. But on the whole, Italian cinema has not commanded the international impact of old. "Ten years ago, [Italian] directors spoke about themselves and their navels," Irene Bignardi, president of Filmitalia, the body promoting Italian films abroad, told me. "Now, the common thread for the new generation is that they analyze reality."Aside from Il Divo's Paolo Sorrentino and Gomorra's Matteo Garrone, Bignardi cites directors such as Paolo Virzì and Tutta la Vita Davanti (All the Life Ahead) about working in call centres and other short-term jobs; or Antonello Grimaldi and his Caos Calmo (Quiet Chaos), a film about a man mourning the loss of his wife. "There's also a new school of documentaries that is really interesting," Bignardi says. She's especially enthusiastic about La Strada di Levi (Levi's Road), a documentary retracing the route writer Primo Levi took when he returned to Italy from Auschwitz, and Vogliamo Anche le Rose (We Want Roses Too) which documents the Italian feminist movement of the 60s and 70s through three women's diaries. The wins at Cannes have played a key role, Bignardi admits, in that they "have given a new sense of confidence, the feeling that we could be recognized internationally and that we could pierce through the barrier of translation". But she also points out that this so-called new generation has not sprung out of nowhere. "Rebirth is in the eye of the beholder," she says. "All these directors already existed, it's just that they weren't noticed."